Blood, Sweat, and Feathers
by ImJustWingingThis
Summary: Magdalene Sinclair was happy being in med school at Colombia University until her past came back knocking. Now on the road with Sam and Dean, Maggie must figure out her role in the whole "saving the world" story while also figuring out her role in Sam Winchester's life.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: So this kinda has been floating around in my head for quite some time and I my best friends finally convinced me to write it out. Chapter takes place just after 1.16 Shadow.**

"So get this," Sam announced as Dean came out of the bathroom. It had been a rough week. Between getting their asses kicked by Meg, finding their father after months of searching, and then watching him run off again all in the same day, it's no wonder why Dean just wanted to crash on the dust covered bed for a week in the crappiest motel they probably have ever checked into. It was all Dean could do to suppress a groan of irritation.

In an attempt to ignore him, Sam continued, "So Susanna Jacobs is now the third person to have committed suicide off of the ninth floor balcony at an apartment complex in New York". Dean flopped onto the bed, stirring dust into the air with a huff of annoyance.

"So? What do you expect? Its finals week," Dean said into the pillow stuffed under his face.

"All from the same balcony?"

"The building probably only has nine floors."

"Dean, it's the third one this week… it's Thursday," Sam whined, "You know, we can't just sit here waiting for Dad to call us again."

Dean finally turned his head out of the pillow, "Fine, but if this turns out to be nothing, you pay my tab at the nearest bar."

"Deal."

—

Pharmacology was eerily quiet Thursday morning. Susanna usually sat two rows in front of Maggie, but today that seat was empty - minus the weird aura that seemed to radiate out from it. Maggie didn't personally know Susanna, but she was one of those people that everyone knew. She was top of her class in the Med program at Colombia University, second only to Maggie herself, but she was so full of energy. While Maggie tended to keep to herself, Susanna was always scheduling study sessions for the class to join in or she was tutoring an undergrad. She was the equivalency of the cheer captain in high school, but a million times more heartfelt. She was just so happy all the time, which tended to make Maggie a bit nauseated, but it was sweet all the same.

Most importantly, though, Susanna never would have killed herself, it just didn't add up. This is what concerned Maggie. She tried to take it at face value when Michael Sigmont jumped because that actually made sense. She became a bit more suspicious when Kelsey Bates jumped the next day, though. Kelsey was a performing arts major that tended to keep to herself, similar to Michael, but more in the introvert type and less in the "probably having a psychotic breakdown" type. Yet when Susanna jumped Maggie realized twice is tragic, three times is a pattern. Something else was at play here and Maggie had that feeling like her past was coming back to bite her in the ass.

So here she was now, in full study gear: sweat pants and a hoodie with her blonde hair piled on top of her head in a sloppy bun, torn between what she should be studying and what she actually was studying. She tried to reason with herself, reminding her that she was retired and she truly needed to be studying for her Patient Psych final that was the next day, which she was trying her best to do. Except the little annoying voice in the back of her head kept telling her another person was going to show up dead tomorrow if she didn't go and do her freaking job.

—

"I don't know, Sammy, don't you think Colombia freaking University is a little high profile for us?" Dean asked from the driver seat of his car. The squeal and creak of the passenger door opening was muffled for once by the sound of upper Manhattan.

"It will be fine, Dean," Sam reassured as he stepped onto the busy sidewalk, "Just go and take a look at the apartment complex and I'll see what I can dig up here." Dean only nods, too distracted by the small trio of coeds chatting and giggling while making their way to class.

"You know, we can probably conquer a lot more if I stay here too," Dean says while wagging his eyebrows.

"And that is what I'm afraid of," Sam sighed, "Just go check out the apartment." Sam tapped the hood of the Impala and started to make his way up the steps towards the University library as Dean pulled away from the curb.

The heat of the furnace was welcoming from the winter cold when Sam entered the building. The second floor housed all of the reference section and small cluster of desktop computers. Dean had been right after all about it being finals week, so Sam wasn't surprised when he found all of the computers taken. Unfortunately, that meant he was going to have to do this the old fashioned way - by hand.

Sam approached the reference desk to find a baby faced freshman who was probably on the work study program working the station. "Um, hi, I was wondering if you had any collection of newspapers that went back a few years or so?" Sam asked. "Trying to write a research paper and I kinda procrastinated a bit."

The clerk scratched his head, "Yeah, man, we have a cart of them that go back to like 1900 or something like that, but we only have one copy and that girl over there kinda has a monopoly on them at the moment," he indicated over Sam's shoulder. "You're welcome to try and convince her to share, but all I can say is 'Good luck'."

Sam thanked the kid before turning in the direction pointed out to him. Towards the back of the study area Sam could see what he would have called "The Great Wall of Research". Boxes upon boxes were stacked on top of each other around the table and on the table top. At first Sam thought she may have abandoned them on the table for the clerks to take care of until he saw a pile of gold hair pop out of the top of the wall she had built around her.

Based on how the clerk spoke of her, Sam didn't really feel like being on her bad side, so he walked around in order to approach her from the side and hopefully not spook her. As he rounded the corner of her makeshift fort she had built, his sense of fear vanished. Hunched over one of the papers, sat a girl around his own age that possibly could have passed for 5'4". He watched as she held her breath and straightened her spine out as long as it could go. She was bundled up in an oversized hoodie and her large framed glasses were perched on the bridge of her small nose. Her finger traced over a line in the article before she turned to her notepad to scribble something down. Sam walked up to her and cleared his throat in order to get her attention.

"Keith, didn't I tell you I would return everything when I was done?" She snapped without even looking up from the paper, "Do I look done, Keith?"

Only now did Sam Winchester actually understand what the clerk, Keith he assumed, had meant. "Well, um, for one: I'm not Keith," Sam said. That got her attention and her head whipped up, throwing her sloppy bun over to the side. "And two: I just wanted to know if I could possibly use some of the newspapers for some research?"

The girl's eyes were full blown showing just how frazzled Sam had made her. They were a dark brown, but he could just barely see flecks of gold in her irises. "Uhh.. umm… yeah," she stuttered. She released a sigh in an attempt to compose herself. "Sorry about that, Keith is always on my ass about this stuff, I just assumed… Anyway, uhh, help yourself."

Sam smiled and nodded taking up a seat next to her, "Hi, I'm Sam." He offered his hand to her and she took it, shaking it firmly.

"Maggie."


	2. Chapter 2

Maggie removed her large glasses from her face and dropped them on top of the article she had just finished scanning though. Pushing herself away from the table, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes with the back of her hands before stretching her arms over her head as fatigue took over her body. Sam noticed Maggie's change in focus and pushed his chair back to match hers so he could study her. She gave him a questioning look as she readjusted her glasses back on her face.

"What?" Maggie laughed.

"Nothing, nothing, I'm just trying to figure out why a Med student would be so interested in architecture," Sam mused, "I mean, I understand the whole serial suicide thing, it's interesting. What I don't get is why you have been looking at nothing but info on one building going back to 1983."

Maggie leaned back in her chair, "What makes you think I'm a Med student?"

Shrugging, Sam replied, "Intuition. Well, that and the medical terminology book sticking out of your backpack." That actually made Maggie laugh.

"Touché," Maggie smiled, "Actually, the 'serial suicide thing' you previously mentioned was for my Patent Psychology class, and the other is for my Humanities class."

Sam grinned back, "And what would a Med student be doing taking a Humanities class?"

"They say it's to make me a more rounded person, but I'm pretty sure it's just to get us to have to pay a higher tuition rate," Maggie joked to cover her lie. "What about you? What's peaked your interest to keep you looking at the obituary pages going back to - what is that? 1912?" Maggie glanced to the top of the newspaper Sam was last reading.

Sam racked his brain to come up with a cover before deciding, "Just, uhh, trying to find someone." It wasn't good, but it was kind of the truth. Maggie raised an eyebrow, clearly not one hundred percent buying it. "I'm trying to trace back someone in my family for a genealogy tree. It's a little weird, I know," he lied hoping to appease her before changing the subject. "What about those deaths at the apartment complex in Morningside Heights? Find anything interesting?"

It was Maggie's turn to shrug. "Eh, what can I say? Maybe you just don't know a person as well as you think."

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Sam confirmed while shuffling back through the paper from earlier that day.

* * *

Not long after, Maggie and Sam gave up looking into their individual projects and packed up to make their separate ways. Although, Maggie may or may not have written her phone number on a sticky note and may or may not have stuck it on one of the pages of notes he was writing. So sue her, he was cute, and funny, and more importantly - he was normal.

Maggie dreamed of having a normal life with someone like Sam, someone to come home to everyday and a career that didn't put everyone she loved at risk. She just wanted to be happy and safe, was that too much to ask for? A tiny part of her always thought, just one more hunt and that could be her's. So damn right she slapped that sticky note down.

But she couldn't have that fairytale ending until she did her chores.

So there sat Maggie in her small studio dorm, stuffing hex bags like her mother taught her all those years ago. Maggie didn't have much with her when she came to Colombia from Georgia, it wasn't like her parents had a college fund saved up for her (and to be honest, if they had, they probably would have spent it all on ammo).

Margot and Richard Sinclair were hunters born and raised. When Maggie came along she was thrown right in, and she loved every minute of it. By the age of six, she was packing energy neutralizing hex bags with Mom and salt rounds with Dad. By twelve she was a walking encyclopedia of supernatural everything. By fifteen she was out in the field leading the hunt. And by the age of seventeen she walked into her childhood home to find her mother lying dead in the kitchen by a pool of her own blood from the slit that decorated her throat, and her father pinned to the wall of his study by the machete he had given Maggie for her sixteenth birthday.

Until that moment, Maggie was content with being a hunter, but after that night she realized she was only content with staying with her family. Her mom and dad were the only two people she truly knew in this world and now they were gone, slaughtered and left on display. After the funeral, Maggie had gone back to the house to clean up what was left of her parents, running on auto pilot. Who knew it would be so hard to get blood out of carpeting? It had soaked completely through the flooring under where she found her father and there was no way of getting it out, but Maggie kept trying. She found a rhythm with it. Blot, blot, blot, rinse. Blot, blot, blot, rinse. It wasn't her first time on clean up duty, but it was the first time doing it alone. So she kept at it like a robot because if she let herself feel any emotion she would drown in it. The real world was just too damn depressing.

The blood didn't trigger her to come back to the real world, nor the shattered glass coffee table or the holes punched through the walls. It was that stupid snow globe. The one she and her dad had picked out when they were in Wyoming last week. Number 46. It was a tradition that started between her and Richard when she was eight. They were in Rhode Island for a werewolf hunt and afterwards Richard took her to the boardwalk for ice cream. They found one of those novelty gift shops and Maggie picked out the first of many small snow globes. _"Daddy, look! It's so sparkly and pretty! And we've never been to Rhode Island before."_ And that's how it started. Every time they went to a new state on a hunt, they brought back a snow globe. There was a whole wall dedicated to them in her father's study, but it was soon filled and Richard was still looking for a way to fit the Wyoming globe on the wall – that is he was.

Maggie got up from where she was working and walked over to her father's desk. She picked up the snow globe and examined it. It was simple, a single elk stood proudly in the center of a snowy field while the base showed an image of a cowboy on a bucking horse and the state name. On the bottom Richard had written 'March 2000'. Maggie toyed with it in her hands as emotion hit her like a brick wall. It didn't trickle out like a crack in the dam, it was as if the dam never existed. It came at her with full force. The grief of losing her parents, guilt of not being here when they needed her, but most forcefully, anger. She was angry. She was angry at whatever killed her parents. She was angry at her parents for making this their life. She was angry that the stupid snow globe didn't fit on the shelf. And she was angry with herself because there was nothing she could do.

She didn't want this anymore, not without her family, and she didn't need these ugly snow globes. Before her mind had even registered what she was doing, Maggie threw the Wyoming snow globe as hard as she could against the solid mahogany bookshelf and watched as it exploded in a shower of water, glitter, and glass shards. She turned to the shelf and one after another smashed the snow globes as she had done the first. Smashing them into the walls and the desk and the floor before crumpling to the ground in heaps and sobs. The glass cut her hands and feet as she fell, but Maggie didn't notice. She was too distracted by the pain in her chest as her tears mixed with the blood dripping down her arms, the blood that marked the spot her father was murdered, and the water of the snow globes.

Later that evening, the Clayton County Fire Department responded to a structure fire at 1182 Woodfield Ln.

"So whatcha find, Sammy?" Dean had asked as soon as Sam walked into the run down hotel room. Sam shrugged as he dropped his bag on the nearby table.

"Nothing, that's just it. That Michael kid was the first death ever at that apartment complex." Dean reached over from the edge of the bed he was too lazy to get up from to grab the stack of notes Sam had taken at the library before propping himself up against the headboard. "The place was built in 1942 as a standard apartment complex before being bought by Colombia to be used as off-campus student housing. What about you?"

Dean bobbed his head as he read along with Sam's notes, "Nothing, no EMF, no unexplained noises, no sulfur, no anything - and the place was just an empty lot before hand?" Sam nodded in confirmation. "Well, I guess we just got to go scope it out, see what we can find. Before we go though, I just have one question, who's Maggie?" Sam's head shot up at the question to see Dean smirking as he held up the last page of Sam's notes. Sure enough stuck dead center of the page was a neon green sticky note with her name and all ten digits of her phone number.

* * *

When Maggie came to Colombia University, she didn't have much left in the terms of equipment, just what was stored in her old yellow VW Beatle. The poor car, affectionately named Old Bessie, had since been sold in exchange for tuition and textbook money, but Maggie had salvaged as much as she could from the old thing and kept them in a locked chest buried deep within her closet. It was probably a good thing Maggie lived alone, or else she probably would have gotten evicted had someone seen her small inventory of weapons: one machete, six silver throwing knives, a sawed off shotgun, and a police issued Glock that she may or may not have stolen from a cop back in Idaho. It wasn't much, just kind of a 'Break Glass In Case of Emergency'.

What really mattered to Maggie at the moment was the box of herbs she kept at the bottom and the two books she had always kept with her. They were similar in appearance, both being thick leather bound journals, one an ebony black and the other a faded brick red, and stamped in gold into the top half of the spine was a perfect Aquarian Star. An eternity ago, they belonged to Margot and Richard. They contained priceless information that had been acquired over the years and were one of the few things Maggie had taken from Georgia.

After being out of practice, it took Maggie half a dozen attempts before successfully completing the recipe her mother had written down and taught her over fifteen years ago. It wasn't terribly difficult, but being out of practice, Maggie's Latin was a little rusty. The idea was simple, similar to a hex bag in design and appearance consisting of purifying herbs and enchantments. Basically once completed all one had to was light this shit on fire and let it burn. So long as it was smoking all supernatural energies would be obsolete, neutralizing the proximal area long enough to get the hell out of there. Think of it as a supernatural electromagnetic pulse. Normally, Maggie used to bring four of five of the little hex bags, but based on the amount of supplies she still had, two would have to do. Unfortunately, her little study session with Sam didn't pan out like Maggie had hoped so she was going to have to go in blind in an attempt to scope out what she was dealing with.

* * *

The complex was quiet when Maggie arrived later in the evening with her backpack that normally held medical textbooks, now full of weapons and ammunition. The courtyard where the bodies were found was empty save for one freshman student who was making his way crossing through, briskly speed walking with his head low to minimize his time in the area. Maggie began pacing the halls one floor at a time with her EMF detector - an old cell phone that her dad had once helped her convert into a scanner.

Luckily, the halls were pretty deserted. Most of the building's residents were holed up in their rooms preparing for their finals, whether that was studying till their brains were fried or knocking back shots till the alcohol poisoning kicked in - and for some, both; a competition to see what would fail first, brain or liver. Maggie's scanner remained silent as she made her rounds. Nothing was out of the ordinary, though. Maybe she was wrong and jumped the gun on this one. It was possible and becoming the most dominant thought in Maggie's mind until she reached the ninth floor.

It started off as a light buzzing that was just barely noticeable. As Maggie continued down the hall towards the ninth floor balcony, the buzzing grew to a piercing ringing. It was deafening to the point of crippling, bringing Maggie to her knees right outside the door leading to the balcony. Maggie covered her ears in an attempt to block it out but it was a futile task. The ringing was coming from inside her own head, increasing the pressure and bursting blood vessels causing blood to trickle from her ears.

Throwing her backpack to the ground next to her, Maggie began digging, trying to find those hex bags that had settled to the bottom. It didn't help that her vision was blurring as the ringing became louder and louder. Her fist finally closed around the rough fabric that encased the dried herbs and she pulled it out alongside her lighter, flicking it one, two, three, four times before the spark finally caught and the small flame appeared.

The burlap cloth of the hex bag caught fire and the saving grace of her mother's teachings flooded the area, ceasing the ringing that paralyzed Maggie. Throwing the door open, Maggie came face to face with two large men, one with shaggy brown hair in the same position she was just in moments ago, on his knees with his forehead pressed to the floor and his hands over his ears in an attempt to muffle the ringing. The other was a blond with hair much shorter than the other man's and he was currently falling over the edge of the ninth floor balcony.


End file.
